Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr was born to Thomas Ruggles Pynchon,
Sr. and Katherine Frances Bennett Pynchon on May 8, 1937 in Glen
Cove, Long Island, New York. They moved to East Norwich when
Thomas, Jr was just a child. His father became town supervisor of
Oyster Bay and later an industrial surveyor. He has two siblings,
sister, Judith and brother, John.

He graduated from Oyster Bay High School in 1953 at the age of
sixteen, salutatorian of his class and winner of the Julia L. Thurston
award for "the senior attaining the highest average in the study of
English." A scholarship to Cornell University and enrollment in the
division of Engineering Physics followed. At the end of his
sophomore year he left Cornell for service in the Navy.

He returned to Cornell in the fall of 1957 transferring to the
College of Arts an Sciences from which he would attain his degree in
English. During this time, he took a course from Vladimir Nabokov,
was on the editorial staff of the The Cornell Writer , and also
published his first short story: "The Small Rain" (The Cornell Writer,
March 1959). He received his B.A. in June of 1959 with "distinction in
all subjects."

Publication of many other short stories followed: "Mortality and
Mercy in Vienna" (Epoch, Spring 1959), "Low-lands" (New World
Writing, 1960), "Entropy" (Kenyon Review, Spring 1960), and "Under
the Rose" (The Noble Savage, May 1961). Upon graduation, Pynchon
had many options including, several fellowships (a Woodrow Wilson
for one), teaching creative writing at Cornell, becoming a disk jockey,
and consideration as a film critic for Esquire.

Instead, he began work on his first novel, V., while in New York
and, with the money from the publishing of "Low-lands" making the
trip possible, later in Seattle during a job with the Boeing Company.
He worked there as an "engineering aide" writing technical
documents from February 2, 1960 to September 13, 1962. He
finished V. in California and Mexico, and it was published in 1963. It
won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for best first novel of
the year.

The publishing of a short story, "The Secret Integration" (The
Saturday Evening Post, December 19, 1964) and parts of a work in
progress "The World (This One), the Flesh (Mrs. Oedipa Maas), and
the Testament of Pierce Inverarity" (Esquire, December 1965) and
"The Shrink Flips" (Cavalier, March 1966) followed. His second
"novel", The Crying of Lot 49, was published in 1966 and won the
Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award of the National
Institute of Arts and Letters.

He wrote "A Journey into the Mind of Watts" for The New York
Times Magazine (June 12, 1966), and, as his success in avoiding any
public exposure (heh, heh) continued for the next seven years, he
worked on Gravity's Rainbow which was finally published in 1973.
In 1974, it shared the National Book Award for fiction with Isaac
Bashevis Singer's A Crown of Feathers. It was also unanimously
selected by the judges for the Pulitzer Prize in literature, but the
selection was overruled by the Pulitzer advisory board whose
members called it "unreadable," "turgid," "overwritten," and
"obscene." No prize was given that year.

Gravity's Rainbow (originally titled "Mindless Pleasures") was also
awarded the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy
of Arts and Letters in 1975 which is given every five years to a work
of fiction; however, Pynchon declined the award through a letter,
suggesting that it be given to another author. He wrote, "The Howells
Medal is a great honor, and, being gold, probably a good hedge
against inflation, too. But I don't want it. Please don't impose on me
something I don't want. It makes the Academy look arbitrary and
me look rude. . . . I know I should behave with more class, but there
appears to be only one way to say no, and that's no."

In the following years, any knowledge of Pynchon's whereabouts
became increasingly valuable and scarce. His early short stories,
excluding "Mortality and Mercy in Vienna" and including "The Secret
Integration" were published in 1984 under the collected title Slow
Learner with the first autobiographical notes from the author; in
1989, he was awarded the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur
Foundation Fellowship ($310,000 over five years), and in 1990
Vineland was published.

The Excluded Middle

The obituariness of the biography above might be due to the
well noted disappearance of Pynchon from the public eye. Let me
try to fill in some of the space between publishings with what others
have written about Pynchon -- some friends others just questers.

Lewis Nichols in "In and Out of Books" writes that Pynchon, during
his last years at Cornell, was "a constant reader -- the type to read
books on mathematics for fun . . . one who started the day at 1 p.m.
with spaghetti and a soft drink . . . and one that read and worked
until 3 the next morning" (8).

Jules Siegel, in his article for
Playboy, remembers Pynchon informing him that Nabokov's Russian
accent was so thick it was hard to understand anything he said. Also,
when asked about the complexity of V. , Pynchon replied, "Why
should things be easy to understand?"

In 1965, Siegel reports that
Pynchon was living in Manhattan Beach, California where he was
working on what would become Gravity's Rainbow which it seems
he had begun soon after the publication of V. and interrupted it to
write The Crying of Lot 49.

He sent Irwin Corey to accept his
National Book Award for Gravity's Rainbow which was dedicated to
his good friend Richard Farina who, two days after his book, Been
Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, had been published, died in a
motorbike accident in 1966. As his elusiveness increased so did the
theories surrounding him.

The most outlandish: John Calvin Batchelor
claimed Pynchon was J. D. Salinger -- not true. Sightings continue to
occur. He's not as reclusive as one might think. It's not like he never
goes out in public. David Gale mentions that Pynchon was doing
research in 1979 in London, and in October of 1987 was in Boston.
Pynchon is also thought to have lived in Aptos, California for an
extended period of time between completion of Gravity's Rainbow
and Vineland.

Who knows where he is now? And who cares? I
don't want you to know who I am.

I urge one to look at the following articles if one has the urge for
more information, but I feel I'm treading dangerously into Tabloid
Land, and I fear I will never get back if I don't turn around and
follow my crumbs or click my heels now. Feel free to investigate the
FAQ and, by the way, the Mathew Winston article has an excellent
history of Pynchon's family whose history Pynchon himself satirizes
via the Slothrops in Gravity's Rainbow .